"Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres”
(Donna Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’)

Who can claim to see, from a body or a place, anything besides a tangled thicket? Among trees, shifting wind and light diffract into patterns, which reveal new dimensions of moss and critter, colour and texture. In 'The Secret Life of Forms', a mesh of pigments and lines reframe the 'natural', casting light on Sarah Davidson's various references. Sinuous lines link to Hilma af Klint, Maria Sibylla Merian, or Ernst Haeckel - through a sieve of observation and projection. Weaving of this kind is not the disembodied view of a transcendentalist; the dizzying effect of roaming perspective is a spidery thought. Sticky webs fold and cling as spiders weave meanings in the changing light and the wind between branches.

Unit 17 is thrilled to announce the group exhibition SUPER, NATURAL, a significant presentation of over sixteen Canadian and international artists, writers and publishers to begin our 2019 program. The exhibition focuses on new and recent painting, sculpture, photography, prints as well as publications. SUPER, NATURAL launches a publishing arm of the gallery, with a physical and online reading room of artist/reference books, magazines & editions. Unit 17 books & editions supports the creation and dissemination of printed matter by represented and supported artists.

SUPER, NATURAL has grown out of the gallery’s overall program, and its relationship to topics of ecology, transformation and entropy. This is an exhibition made up of our immediate surroundings and looks to human potential, our environment, its politics and poetics. Its title plays off of an omnipresent dogma of British Columbia - consumed in the most pedestrian of ways - working through this dense myriad of collaborators for this exhibition. It also reflects a more local art history, echoing ideas of multiplicity through social, cultural and economic means; the abstract, the real and the spiritual. SUPER, NATURAL is a not an exhibition in isolation but one that is bound to community.

This exhibition expands the reach of the gallery – physically, emotionally and socially. Proceeds from SUPER, NATURAL will change our infrastructure, in an effort to create a more neutral organization. This is to be completed through a three-prong system: larger focus on food production, rain water storage and solar power. Other proceeds made from sales of this exhibition and continued sales from Unit 17 books & editions will go to the Unist’ot’en Camp and other organizations fighting to protect Indigenous sovereignty and environmental justice.

The gallery’s garden will feature two rotating outdoor installations on view until Spring 2019 by Emily Neufeld and Colleen Brown.

PUDDLE POPPER slips through realities towards our desires, passing between description, invention and idealization to wiggle around truths. Through merging of forms, Puddle Popper creates a set-like world featuring invented beings, humanoids, tentacles and unreadable text. Appendages transform. Colour is revised. Portals open up, limbs are put part way through, and then all the way through, and new bodies are observed and created.

Puddle Popper is an artist collective formed in 2015 in Vancouver by artists Sarah Davidson, Juli Majer, Sonja Ratkay and Mel Thibodeau. They propose alternate spaces in which bodies both human and non-human interact: themes of difference, embodiment and ecology are the basis for playful, collaborative world-building.

“The onion loves the onion.
It hugs its many layers,
saying, O, O, O,
each vowel smaller
than the last.”
(Lorna Crozier, from The Sex Lives of Vegetables)

Do plants care about art? How closely are they watching us? Are we too late to start listening? Using the Bovey Teaching Greenhouse as a gallery space, three artists interpret the idea of plants as sensitive beings. The title of the exhibition alludes to the agency playfully accorded vegetables in Lorna Crozier’s poetry collection The Garden Going On Without Us. Where Crozier imagines that onions have sex lives, the artists of Going On Without Us toy variously with visions of a posthuman world: as a speculative fiction, philosophical argument, and allegory of the present.

The location of the exhibition suggests possibilities for cross-disciplinary conversation between art and other forms of research, and reflects the various investigations of the individual artists. By situating this project in a working greenhouse, they have foregrounded the vegetable kingdom to speak to ideas of intersectionality, synchronicity, and site-specificity central to each of their practices.

The E.C. Bovey Building is located on the southwest corner of the main Guelph campus. Built in 1991, the complex houses both faculty as well as research facilities. In addition, the Bovey complex includes an expansive network of greenhouses and growth room facilities, found west of the main lab/administrative buildings. The tropical greenhouse houses a collection of plants, including tropicals, cacti and orchids.

Origin of Species by Darwin, and Kelvin’s laws of thermodynamics were published in the same decade. They both came on the tail end of the industrial revolution. Both theories were argued as paradoxical, and heretical, by the church. Both conceptually resist the possibility of a creative or intelligent design in the world. However, once you consider the closed system of thermodynamics as being one which encompasses you, the earth, the universe, this transfer of heat and its loss in the process – the movement of such energy – can still create a beautiful and complex diversity of ruin.

excerpt from you can’t see the forest, catalogue essay by Brynn McNab published as for the trees